What Are We Doing in Latin America

by Robert Riche

  “They’re kidding,” Annie says, all of a sudden speaking up, expressing indignation.

  “They’re not kidding,” I say. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because the kidnappers will retaliate and kill the hostages.”

  “That’s not necessarily true.”

  “Well, there’s a good chance,” she says.

  It occurs to me that I might have expected her to take a soft position in this circumstance. Even though my better judgment tells me she is probably right. “Well, they have to do something,” I say.

  “Yes, they could do something about whatever it is that’s behind all this business.”

  “And you know what that is?”

  “It’s not my job to know.”

  “Well, there are a lot of people whose job it is to know who can’t get a handle on this thing, honey.” A little bit of the British snottiness again. “And I’m sure if there was a chance of doing anything, they would have done it by now.” Which, in truth, I don’t know whether I believe or not.

  “Their idea of doing something is to send in the bombers.”

  “It is not,” I say, my irritability clearly revealing itself now. “Maybe there’s no alternative. We can’t let them run all over us.” Perhaps because I feel I have maneuvered myself into a position that I have no idea how to defend, I say this in a very loud voice, and probably in an unpleasant tone of voice, too. It has the effect, anyway, of rousing the prodigal son.

  “Could you keep the noise down, please?” he pipes up.

  “No! We’re having a discussion here!” I shoot back at him. “Maybe you could take an interest in what’s going on.”

  “It’s boring.”

  “It’s not boring! You’re boring!”

  “Bill!” my wife interjects.

  “What?” Is she about to take his side again? “It’s not rock and roll, and it’s not dope, so maybe it’s too much to expect that he’d care anything about it.”

  “That’s not fair,” Annie says.

  “Yes. It’s fair.” I try to catch my son’s eye in the rearview mirror. “Our government is about to launch an air strike against guerrilla bases in Central America,” I bellow at him. “That’s guerrilla—terrorists—underground fighters—spelled G, U, E, guerilla, not the kind that swings from trees—”

  “Oh, really!” my wife says.

  “Yeah, really,” my son adds.

  “What do you think about that?” I ask him. “Is it a good idea, or not?”

  “I dunno,” he says.

  “Well, let me tell you something,” I say, glancing over at Annie to catch her reaction. “It may be the only course we have left! Does anybody want to disagree with that?”

  “What’s the point of disagreeing with you?” my wife says. “You’ve already made up your mind.”

  “I have not made up my mind! I might not even agree with that position.” And sounding truly foolish, even to myself now, I add, hoping to justify the statement I have just made, “But, I have to admit, I’m just a little bit sick and tired of seeing this nation—us—being pushed all over the goddamn map by a bunch of—greaseball, dirty, unshaven—”

  “Oh, come on!” my wife exclaims.

  “—troublemaking—shitheads!”

  I finish on that note, and there is silence in the car, the others having become momentarily intimidated. I recognize that I have to slide down a bit from the summit of this angry outburst which probably has gone a bit further, a lot further, than I had intended it to. “There is such a thing as standing up to bullying,” I say somewhat more quietly, hoping maybe that will make some sense.

  “There is such a thing as cutting off your own nose to spite your face, too,” Annie puts in slyly.

  “You haven’t answered my question!” I shoot back at her.

  “Can we change the subject?” my daughter interjects.

  “You want to talk about shopping?” I reply, in a manner close to a sneer. I have not come off well in this.

  “You stink,” she says.

  “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! What?” I apply my foot to the brake with such force that the car fishtails, slithering out of control for a moment, until I let up, and it straightens itself out, and we slow down and come to a bumpy and jolting stop on the gravel shoulder of the highway.

  “I will not permit—”

  “You started it,” my daughter says.

  “Quiet!” I bellow at her, but now that we are stopped, I really don’t know what I will do next. My daughter was the last person I had expected to jump in at me.

  “Everybody stop it,” my wife says. “If you don’t stop it, I’m getting out. I’m not going another mile in this kind of hideous situation.”

  Nobody says anything. Other cars are whizzing by and blaring their horns at us. In a very quiet, measured tone I say, “It’s bad enough what’s going on with this kidnapping business. We can agree or disagree about that. I might even agree with what you are saying, although I’m not sure I know what that is. But what really gets to me and drives me crazy, is when children who have been brought up decently and to believe in the decent things of life begin acting in disrespectful ways that are identical—in every respect—to the way these terrorists outlaws are behaving in the news.” There. That was what I meant to get at.

  Having said that, and with no one immediately coming back at me, I put the car into drive, turning back out onto the highway again. And emboldened, I think by their continuing silence, I turn briefly to my wife for confirmation. “Do you agree?”

  My wife looks straight ahead. “I think you’re crazy,” she says at last.

  For just an instant, I realize how close I am to lashing out at her and doing something just terrible. The effort to control the rush of rage within me actually causes my body to shudder, and I grip the wheel even tighter as if to hang on to save my dear life. I have never struck at my wife. Nor at my children. Nor, in fact, at any other human being on earth. At least, not since I was twelve years old and got beat up in a fight in the schoolyard over something having to do with marbles.

  “We have a difference of opinion on that,” I say almost inaudibly, resentfully.

  My wife doesn’t say another word. Nobody says anything. They are too wise to provoke me further, and we continue along now for the rest of the journey in uninterrupted misery and silence.

  CHAPTER XIII

  As we turn into the driveway of my father’s apartment house, I catch a glimpse of him peering out through his living room window from behind a curtain where he has stationed himself awaiting our arrival. A moment later, as we unload ourselves from the Pontiac, he is at the front door, like a minister at the entrance to his church, grinning and waiting to greet us.

  “Well, well, well,” he says, jovially greeting the first to approach him, my wife, with a peck on the cheek. My wife and I are not sure, but we suspect he greets her invariably in this same way, neither actually saying hello nor speaking her name, because he has trouble remembering what her name is. This is not because of his age, we have decided, but rather out of long habit. Although over these many years my father has come to have a high regard for my wife, primarily because of her many solicitous attentions on his behalf, there nevertheless is a carryover from the early days when it was in his head that her manner and style, in keeping with the tag end of the radical ’60s, were not precisely in accord with what he had envisioned as being appropriate for his son. When I first introduced this new girl with the long hair and granny glasses to my father (more than twenty years ago), he made it very clear that he flatly did not approve of her. During the whole time of our first visit he refused to so much as glance in her direction. Before we left I advised my mother that I didn’t care if he liked this new girl or not, but if he couldn’t, at the least, be polite, then we would not be able to come up any more. After that, my father always managed to be civil, if not quite polite, but for many years afterward, even long after we were married and my wife gave up her granny gl
asses for soft contact lenses, it was with the greatest effort that he was able to bring himself to look directly at her and speak her name.

  “Hello, honey.” This next to my daughter, with another peck on the cheek. We are not sure whether or not he remembers his granddaughter’s name, either. We suspect his invariable failure to address her by name is simply an unconscious expression of his disappointment in her for having been born a girl instead of a boy.

  “Ah ha! Look at Old Pete! He’s grown another foot!” My father is beside himself with glee, as the one and only and latest in the male Brock line, the one to confirm the greatest of all expectations, shuffles up to him, hair in his eyes, eyes averted to the ground, sneakers untied, tie-dyed T-shirt mostly concealed under the blue button-down Oxford Shirt that we have forced him to put on. “You trying to make us all look like midgets, Pete?”

  Peter squeezes out a painful smile. He is still growing, but already is about the same height as my father, who is about 5’6”. In his prime my father attained a height of perhaps 5’8”, but now, at age 78, under the weight of an every-spreading girth, his body has compacted a bit, giving him the appearance not altogether unlike Humpty Dumpty.

  And last, to the prodigal son, me, “Hello, there, hot stuff.” And craning his neck around for a glance toward the driveway, “Car looks good.” He has noticed, as I suppose I had hoped he would, the result of our having stopped just outside of town to run the wagon through a car wash (with hot wax).

  I shake hands with my father, and also give him a peck on the cheek, in so doing noting the familiar sweet cloying spicy fragrance of his after-shave cologne. He is nattily dressed, as always, for which I admire him, though there was a time when I used to scoff at the way he dressed, when he and my mother would come up to visit me at Amherst in their gray flannels and tweeds, and I would meet them in my baggy suntan Chinos and sweater worn out at the elbows, which was de rigeur at Amherst at that time. My parents were always horrified, of course, by my appearance, something I have to remind myself of whenever I am startled by my son in one of his death’s head T-shirts. It is an irony not lost on me that, in fact, I am wearing today the identical uniform that my father has always worn.

  His eyes go up and down over me, from my shoes to the top of my head before a tight smile forms on his mouth and he revolves his body jerkily in a semi-circle and leads the way into his apartment. We follow behind, bearing gifts.

  Tillie is standing in the middle of the living room as we enter. We all embrace, and Tillie has a specially warm squeeze for Laura, which my wife and I appreciate as much as Laura does.

  “Sit down, sit down,” my father says, and as we settle ourselves into the old over-sized easy chairs that I remember from childhood as fitting in better in another larger house, we find ourselves arranged in front of a 24-inch color television set with the sound off but with the picture tuned to a show in which the camera focuses on four females of varying ages, all seated behind a conference table facing a giant wheel spun by a sort of carnival barker in a business suit.

  “Make everybody a drink, Bill,” my father says. “You know where the stuff is.”

  I do know where the stuff is, the stuff being a bottle of Seagram’s Seven, which I don’t really like, nor does my wife. But we will both drink it now. The kids will each have a Coke. Tillie will nurse the drink she already has, and my father, without saying anything, hands me his highball glass with the melted ice cubes, which I take with me out to the kitchen for a refill.

  This is an unvarying routine each time we come up. While I am out in the kitchen, I can hear my father saying, “Old Pete, how’s the Old Pete?” And when my son croaks out an “Okay, I guess,” my father explodes into laughter, seemingly deriving the same kind of enjoyment from this predictable exchange with his grandson as he might from an intricate mechanical toy, say, one of those monkeys with the cymbals and drums that you wind up and set on a table to perform its jerky banging and clanging motions until the spring runs down and you have to wind it up again.

  In the living room with our drinks, with the TV still on and the sound still off, my father removes his attention from Pete for a minute, and turns to me. “How’s the job going, Bill?”

  “Pretty good, Dad. Can’t complain.”

  “You’ve been traveling, haven’t you?”

  “I was in Vegas last week.”

  “Las Vegas? You were? That’s where they have all the big shows. Wayne Newton has a big show there.”

  “Yes, he does.”

  “Your company must think a lot of you, sending you out there.”

  “Oh, they do,” I say.

  “Flying out all over the country. That’s what the company presidents do. Fly all the time.”

  I look over at Annie. “I could do without it, Dad.”

  “Oh, you don’t mean that. Flying around the country. That’s big stuff.”

  Why is that I won’t gratify him? It would be a simple enough thing to go along with him. Before I can reply, my wife interjects, with a smile directed at my father. “You’re right, Grampy. It’s big stuff.”

  My father is not quite ready to let the subject go completely. “It took you a little while,” he says, “but you finally came around.”

  Wisely, my wife, with a quick wink in my direction, jumps in quickly, signalling everyone to gather around the coffee table where we have deposited our pile of birthday gifts.

  “Come on, Grampy. Time to open your presents,” she says.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” my father says.

  “We want to,” my wife says.

  “It’s more blessed to give than to receive,” Tillie puts in.

  Nobody is quick to respond to this. Finally, it is my daughter who says, “That’s right. It is.”

  “Now, what could this be?” My father, with a twinkle in his eye that lets us know he has a pretty good idea, attacks the gay birthday wrapping paper on a flat box that could only hold a shirt or a sweater. “A sweater, I’ll bet.” And removing the cover and spreading the tissue paper aside, triumphantly he removes a tan wool cardigan.

  “How about that?” he says, turning to my wife. “This from you, honeybug?”

  My wife, pleased, smiles at him, and nods.

  “Good,” he says. “My old one was getting a hole in the sleeve.”

  “I’m glad you like it, Grampy,” my wife says, and she gets up, and goes over to him, and gives him a little peck on the lips.

  Next is a bottle of his favorite Seagram’s Seven, from me, in an oblong box with a plastic bow on the top, which he opens, again with a twinkling in his eyes. “A pair of slippers, I’ll bet,” he says, sliding out the bottle, and holding it up like a trophy.

  “Good boy,” he says to me. “This I’ll put aside for the gang when they come over.”

  My wife hands him a little package wrapped by my daughter, which he takes, saying, “What’s this? Something from Old Pete?”

  “It’s from Laura,” my wife says.

  “Oh?” he says, as though surprised. He claws at the birthday wrapping paper, finally getting it off, and removing a bright yellow ceramic coffee mug which my daughter made for him in school during the last spring term. On one side of it his name is spelled out in different colored glazed letters, as cheerful as a bouquet of flowers. Exhibiting it to the room, but without actually looking at it, or without looking at his granddaughter, either, he says, “Well, well, well.”

  With a sudden surprising edge in my voice, I say, “Do you know what it is?”

  My father clearly does not like being questioned in this manner, because he snaps back at me, “Of course I know what it is.” He brings the cup down before his eyes, and says, “A cup.”

  “It has your name on it,” I say. “Laura made it for you.”

  “Oh?” he says. He rotates the cup clumsily in his hands until he is able to make out the name. “I didn’t see that,” he says.

  “I didn’t think you did,” I say.

  He looks
over at my daughter now, perhaps for the first time since she has arrived. “Thank you very much, Sweetie,” he says.

  My daughter pops out of her chair, and goes over to him and flings her arms around his neck, and gives him a kiss.

  “Very nice,” he says. And reaches out for the last package on the table which contains, it will come as a surprise to no one in the room, a bottle of his favorite cologne. Before opening it, he gives it a small shake, the twinkle in his eye returning, as he looks over at my son. “This is from Old Pete,” he says.

  Old Pete shifts uncomfortably, and looks away as my father rips off the paper that my wife has wrapped it in, and holds up high the bottle of cologne. “Ah ha!” he exclaims. “You even know the kind I use.” (Which is almost true; my wife knows). My father unscrews the cap, and slaps a generous amount of the cologne on his face, thereby adding a fresh infusion of its spicy scent to the room.

  “Thank you, Old Pete!” My father looks fondly over at my son, perhaps hoping that Peter will leap out of his chair and come over to give him an embrace. Pete, instead, extends an index finger, and waggles it at my father, suggesting the offhand manner of Clint Eastwood.

  “Well, that was very nice,” my father says at last. “Have we got time for another drink?”

  We all do take time for another drink, including Tillie, who takes a second “very light” whiskey and ginger ale, and twenty minutes later we are ready to go out for my father’s birthday dinner.

  My father has chosen the restaurant where we are to take him and has made the reservation himself. We have been here before, to the Coach House. It is a successful enterprise operated by an accountant, one Teddy, and his wife, Marie, who started with a diner (“Good food at an honest price”) and not long afterward expanded the premises out half an acre behind the original building. With the opening of the new facility, they introduced a new menu featuring “Continental Cuisine,” including such items as veal Orloff and Tournedos Rossini (pronounced “Tornadoes” by the high school girl who is our waitress and who recommends it a few moments later). A four-page raised velvet menu 24” X 18” (with a tassle) now lists complete dinners and à la carte “Continental Favorites,” together with a list of liquor, beer and wines on the back page. A little card on the table reads, “May we suggest a bottle of Mateus Rosé for your dining pleasure.”